Tuesday, September 15, 2015

“A Touch Above Any General Training I Ever Attended”: The Photographs of the 93rd New York, Part 6.

If you have been following my latest series of posts, you know that I’ve been talking about the 93rd New York photographs from August 1863 and the casualties suffered during the Overland Campaign. Well, here is yet another. This tale is told by a poet.

After the two-dayBattle of the Wilderness, the 93rd New York counted up its losses. The regiment had suffered 260
casualties: four officers killed, forty-one enlisted men killed, two enlisted
men missing, and 213 officers and enlisted men wounded, twenty-five of whom later died.
With barely a pause, the regiment followed the Army of the Potomac into its next
fight, the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. The regiment fought every day
for the next ten days, but it engaged most heavily during the charge against
the Mule Shoe salient on May 12. By the end of the week, another forty-five
officers and men had been killed or wounded.

One of the casualties from this week of bloodshed was
Corporal Samuel M. Peters of Company G, age 34, of Waterford, New York, who
fell wounded during the assault against the salient. As he told his story to a friend, “I
was standing on the rebel breastwork near Col. [John] Crocker and Lieut. [Simon]
Newcomb, when a bullet struck me in the right groin and immediately another
struck me in the left hip and knocked me down as quick as if I had ‘been
shot’.” Knocked back by these two successive musket balls, Corporal Peters fell
into a pile of mud and began swearing loudly. Eventually, two men from his
regiment carried him to the rear.

While in the hospital, Peters completed a short poem, an
epitaph to the men from his regiment who had been killed. He had started this poem
on May 6 amid a lull in the Battle of the Wilderness. Now, he found an
opportunity to put in the final lines. Eventually, veterans from the regiment
published a version of his poem in the regimental history. However, what
appears below is his first draft, the one that Peters mailed home on May 19,
1864:

To the mustered-out Battalion of the 93d New York Veteran
Volunteers:

Ye are mustered out, ye glorious men,

And the ringing peal of your battle shout

Is heard no more in the woodland glen

Where your earth lives poured so freely out;

Perhaps your spirits linger now

Amid the lurid smoke and flame,

Where every dying hero’s brow

Was wreathed in never-dying fame.

Ye are mustered out, ye glorious men,

And I love to think as the hot tears gush

How ye thundered through that woodland glen,

With a wild hurrah and a headlong rush

Cheering, rallying, onward still!

The ranks grew thin, but the line swept on,

And the glorious flag flew from hill to hill

Till the field was ours, and the victory won.

Like most soldiers from
the 93rd New York, Peters was shocked by his first
battles. He told his friends, “The battle of Spotsylvania Court House was a
touch above any general training I ever attended and the list of killed and
wounded will be likely to prove it. We fought the gray backs from the 5th
to the 12th, they under cover, we the attacking party, and my
acquaintance with the boasted chivalry of the South has not exalted them much
in my estimation.”

Interestingly, Peters mentioned a curious detail about one
of the dead lieutenants in his regiment: “Dr. Gray’s son, Liston, was killed on
the 5th. I hid his body and can find it again if not taken away.”

Peters recovered from his wound and returned to duty,
becoming the regiment’s principal musician. He was killed in action on October
27, 1864, at the Battle of Burgess Mill. He was buried on the field and today his
gravesite is unknown.

﻿

Here is Company G, 93rd New York. Somewhere in this image, I don't know where, is the poet-soldier, Samuel Peters.

﻿

Here is a close up of Lt. Gray, the officer that Peters buried.

﻿

Just because I prefer to overdo things, here is another close-up of Lt. Gray, this one taken from the staff photograph.

1 comment:

The location if the group image is known.. It is above Welford's Ford, south side of the Hazel River. (Stratton Farm, today.) It is part of a series of photos taken at the time, and if you recall the image of many wagons lined up and photographed on the side of a hill facing the photographer, then you will of course recognize that hill in the background.